A data processing system may include hardware resources, such as one or more processors, random access memory (RAM), read-only memory (ROM), etc. A processor may include multiple processing cores. The processing system may also include software resources, such as a basic input/output system (BIOS), a virtual machine monitor (VMM), and one or more operating systems (OSs).
A processor may provide hardware support for processing vectors. A vector is a data structure that holds a number of consecutive elements or data items. A vector register of size M may contain N vector elements of size O, where N=M/O. For instance, a 64-byte vector register may be partitioned into (a) 64 vector elements, with each element holding a data item that occupies 1 byte, (b) 32 vector elements to hold data items that occupy 2 bytes (or one “word”) each, (c) 16 vector elements to hold data items that occupy 4 bytes (or one “doubleword”) each, or (d) 8 vector elements to hold data items that occupy 8 bytes (or one “quadword”) each.
To provide for data level parallelism, a processor may support single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) operations. SIMD operations involve application of the same operation to multiple data items. For instance, in response to a single SIMD add instruction, a processor may add a specified value to each element in a vector.